This review will be for the Rockbros Two Bicycle Indoor Vertical Bike Rack (model # 44210006001/USA), which is a bike rack system consisting of wide fold-out legs, a central extendable shaft with a pair of fully adjustable mounts and hooks to hold two bikes, one stacked above the other.
This is great for small spaces and places where you don’t have a lot of room to store your bikes, or need to keep your bikes out of the way.
In our case, we have a fairly good-sized house and garage but the garage is an older garage with no floor drainage – not the best place for storing bikes (or cars for that matter) in the Winter. And the house is a mixture of a 200-year-old house with a newer single-floor modern addition, the addition’s rooms are all in full use and the upstairs of the house is very very small with only standing height along the middle of the roof, which very much prevents much storage, especially since one room is a guest bedroom. The rooms of the 200-year-old section (where we want to store the bikes) are somewhat small and badly designed with the main room oddly-shaped because of a large non-functional fireplace.
So the conundrum is having a fair amount of space but trying to fit everything in odd rooms in some cases. I’m sure a lot of people have the same issues.
Thus, the vertical bike rack idea. There are a lot of vertical bike rack designs and types; from light-duty to heavy-duty, from single bike storage to up to four bikes, free-standing to top and bottom attachments, from storage of the bike by hanging it horizontally or vertically, or even upside-down. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of designs.
I do want to interject here; that if you have hydraulic disc brakes you probably want to be avoid anything that hangs your bike itself vertically, and certainly not upside-down. Unless you enjoy bleeding your brakes often. Needless to say, I use this rack only with the bikes mounted horizontally with the upper bars on the hooks but it does have the other options.
After a lot of research, I chose the Rockbros Two Bicycle Indoor Vertical Bike Rack. Floor-wise it only takes about the space of storage for one bike, though in fact with the legs deployed it really allows some other things to be stored close under the bottom bike. So really it takes only a partial bike footprint area, as long as you are careful unloading the bottom bike then things can be stored fairly close or even slightly overhanging the extended legs and beneath the bike. A lot of this depends on your particular situation of course.
You’ll find this particular model sold in a number of other places on the Internet, some with a higher price. I think Rockbros website itself sells it for $119+.
If you have read some of my previous blog entries you’ll see that I have quite a few of Rockbros stuff, like bike bags, and have been really impressed with the quality of their equipment, with the exception of one item.
So with this bike rack the size of the shafts and mounts and the overall look and specs of the bike rack sold me, after tons of research.
The total bike capacity of this rack is 88 pounds (40 kg) total, plenty for a pair of road bikes or gravel bikes, maybe some MTB’s.
The main shaft of the unit is about 45 mm in diameter, 1.77 inches.
The legs can be extended to about 6 feet, 1.9 meters +. Getting a bit ahead of myself in the blog flow here but wanted to mention that I found that I didn’t need to extend them fully for it to be exceptionally stable, you can adjust the leg expansion from fully folded to full 6 plus feet (1.8 meters or so).
A slightly amusing side note here and a bit off-track – when I received what I thought was the shipment of this bike rack, somewhere along the way Amazon’s shipping department had made a mistake. In place of the bike rack, I got a very expensive, large desktop ice maker unit. It seems amusing now but at the time I was perplexed, and a bit peeved. Fortunately, it was no issue to peel the labels off the box and go to the nearest UPS store and drop it off for a return. And as a bonus I suppose, I think I helped to bring a little cheer to the UPS store workers when I explained that I had ordered a bike rack and got a bit ice maker instead. That got a chuckle from all of the employees.
Once I received my refund I ordered another and received it quickly – this time the actual bike rack 😉 Obviously an issue at Amazon and not with RockBros.
Upon receiving the unit my most important paramount thought was to look the bike rack over with a very critical eye. After all, we were going to store two expensive bikes on it so it had to be perfect and as heavy-duty and well-made and the pictures on Amazon.
So despite the specs and photos on the Amazon page and Rockbros’ website, I was fully prepared and ready to send it right back if any part of it was questionable in quality or beefiness or there was any issue or question I had with any part of it, whatsoever, no matter how small.
But you know what? Once I opened the box any concern I might have had evaporated away. Sheesh, the thing is built like a tank. Well, at least like a tank as much as aluminum parts and some plastic parts can ever be.
The aluminum shaft is thick and wide, plenty heavy-duty with the inner one only slightly less so. The legs are heavy and stable, and clamp down extremely securely with levered clamps. Setting it up and tilting it by hand is a quick and easy way to check how stable the whole thing is.
The clamp on the extendable shaft is similar and just as heavy-duty as the clamp for the legs, with the lever to clamp it down.
Moving on to the clamps that hold the mounts that hold the bikes; again they are heavy plastic with knobs that tighten down onto the shaft, looking at the design it seems to be very secure. The mounts that hold the hooks are heavy aluminum and the hooks themselves are plenty heavy enough to hold more than the rated weight, I believe.
In fact, I would guess that the whole thing could securely hold more than the rated weight limit, just a guess on my part of course and you would not want to surpass that rated limit with, say, a couple of fat bikes or something crazy.
The funny thing about the Amazon listing is that it mentions the legs are in a ‘triangular shape’, which to me implies three legs. Obviously from the photos there are four legs.
The shaft extends from approximately 68 inches (173 cm) to 110.2 inches (280 cm). The top of this shaft has a little plastic plug.
The descriptions mention a one-year maintenance service from Rockbros, I’m not exactly sure what that would be outside of the obvious, but I guess it means there is a one-year warranty. Ah yes, the actual Rockbros site uses the word ‘warranty’.
The mount for the bike hooks can be adjusted through a fair angle off from horizontal so if you have a bike with a sloping angle on the top bar you can orient the bike to keep it horizontal, if desired.
The hooks for your bike that go into these mounts can be slid along the slot in the mounting plate over a good range, you have a lot of leeway here and I originally had slid these out to their farthest extension, and tightened them up but found that I had to adjust them inward a bit. So they should slide out or in far enough for most any bike. The hooks can be used to grab your front tire also for vertical hanging, of course you would have to position one bike on one side of the main shaft and the other bike on the other for them to hang this way I guess, or maybe only put one bike on. And, of course, not maybe so good for bikes with hydraulic brakes. I did not try this obviously.
The hooks have a suitable rubbery covering over them but I did use some Scotch Anti-Slip pads and cut them into strips and wrapped the hooks with them, for some extra soft protection. I think the rubbery covering would have been fine but I’m paranoid about not scratching our bikes. Mor in the mods section below.
One thing it did not come with is assembly directions. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that anyone who is mentally and physically able to buy this should be able to figure out how to assemble it by going back to the item’s page and just looking at the pics and putting it together from that. There’s not much to it and likely you don’t even need to refer to the assembled pics, even.
Nonetheless, I will quickly go over the assembly process.
Everything is packed securely in a long thin box with cardboard padding and the parts in plastic bags. There is the long central shaft which has the legs folded into it and the extendable section retracted into the larger shaft. There are the hooks, the mounts for the hooks, the thumb tighteners and associated hardware for everything, and the upper clamp for the upper hook mount.
You can extend the legs and tighten the clamp for it – which is very much like the clamp you find on a bicycle for the wheel thru-axles, etc. Except that it is much larger of course, but it works in the same way – by flipping the clamp over so that it snugs against the shaft. If it is not completely tight then you may have to flip it open again and tighten the corresponding bolt head (with a hex head/Allen wrench from your bike toolset) or flip the flipper around a few times, whichever way tightens it the easiest. Again, very similar to what you would do on a bike.
Now you can tilt it a bit to the side or onto its side and pull the smaller extendable shaft upward, and adjust the extendable shaft as far as you need it. Of course, it may take a little experimentation to see how far you want it extended or how far retracted, depending on your ceiling and your bikes and preferences and situation.
Once you get it right or close to the length that you want it extended then you can tighten the leg clamp, in the same way you tighten the leg clamps – by flipping the lever over and, as above, if it is not tight you have to tighten the clamp bolt itself before you flip the lever.
Now you can install the upper clamp for the upper hook mount arm. There is a slot in the extendable shaft that corresponds to the tab in the clamp, once you have the clamp slid down to what looks like a good initial position you just tighten this clamp by turning the big knob.
The lower one works similarly, you may want to kind of position it and tighten it for an initial sizing, then reposition it later.
There is hardware for the arms that the hooks are attached to, for both the upper and lower clamps for holding these (the part with the knob). For both the upper and lower mount arm for the hooks, the hardware consists of a pair of Allen bolts, rubber compression rings, and washers. One set goes into the middle bolt hole of the mount arm and the other set goes into the arc-shaped slot at the bottom.
Put the bolt through the rubber piece and then the washer and thread these into the holes, tighten them with your Allen wrench but don’t tighten them fully. Make it snug and tight but not fully tightened. Even with a fairly horizontal top bar you may be adjusting this slightly, just make sure they are safely snugged. I believe with the rubber pieces that go on these that the bolts are not meant to be totally tightened down fully, so as to allow the mount arm to swivel a bit. As I said above – you want it snug and safe but it’s good if it can swing a bit, at least initially. In fact, if these aren’t too snug you can kind of let some gravity level the bike some, with the help of a light manual touch to it when the bike is in place, though I doubt any bike is going to be totally weight-balanced front to back. But with the rubbery pieces you can swing the mount arms a bit and they will generally stay in place when you reposition them.
For the hooks you thread a thumb-bolt and washer onto them from the back, I would suggest getting a rough estimate of how wide you want these to be from looking/measuring at your bike’s top bar – you want them inward some so as to be able to slide the bike on, you’ll see what I mean if you slide them too far to the outside (unless you have a real large or long bike).
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Now comes some trial and error and experimenting as to the heights of the extendable section and the position of the upper hook mount and lower hook mount, and maybe how far apart you want the hooks to be positioned.
A safety note here. For the most part, I didn’t feel that careful positioning and trial and error of putting the bikes on and taking them off multiple times was going to cause any chance of them hitting the shaft when positioning them but I also am very, very careful with things like that.
But whether you are an uber-careful person or not, and also for long-term use then I would suggest that you see my mods section below. Specifically using foam pipe insulation or something else to wrap the main shaft at the level of each bike and specifically the down tube level in case your bike swings on the hooks a bit. And you probably want to put the bikes on with the drive-side out to keep them far away from the shaft, for the most part you can’t put them on the other way as it is too close.
You really don’t realize how wide the legs are until you get the rack set up, though they can pulled in as much as you want. Obviously, when you retract them too much it will be less stable. So that is something to keep in mind – the farther out you deploy the legs the more stable it will be (unless perhaps you use my suggestion below in the mods, which may or may not work for you).
The only real caveat I would say concerning this bike rack is if you have low ceilings. Our ceilings aren’t the highest in the 200-year-old part of our house but the bikes did fit, and that padding I put around the central shaft for both the upper and lower bike (as mentioned in the mods and above) is a good safety measure, even though the bikes do not touch anything or come particularly close while sitting static on the bike rack – you never know. If you have kids, pets, or people moving things around it’s probably good to consider some padding around the shaft and also around the top part of the legs if your lower bike is anywhere close to the lower part. And I want to add that even if you have taller ceilings and the above isn’t ‘an issue I still think the padding is a good idea anyway. For both the top and bottom bikes, you can never be too careful.
Secondarily, for the upper bike I had to put that one on first with the mounting clamp a bit lower and then slide the clamp and bike up a few inches so it was fairly close to the ceiling, then tighten it, thus giving me plenty of room for the lower bike to then be mounted. Again – if you have ‘regular’ height ceilings then this probably isn’t going to be an issue, but for me it was. And while the bikes are going to be stored on it all Winter without moving them; those who might need to use this rack for regular use – mounting bikes on and off often – this could be a bit of a concern or at least something to keep in mind for those with low ceilings.
And on a side note, I think I have done well to not mention that this bike rack is kind of like a stripper pole for bikes. Oops, now I did… 😉
Probably the only two real minor downsides to the rack, and I’m being nitpicky – is that they probably could have thrown in a little single piece of paper with some simple instructions for some people, and there are some mods that I did as mentioned below – a bit of padding to wrap around would be great but I did not in any way expect this bike rack to come with the things I added, as they were not in the description nor counted upon to be included.
I’d also throw out the idea here that once in a while you might want to check the tightness of each clamp and part. Everything is nicely made but you never know when something may work loose – same as with your bike itself.
So I have to say that I am extremely pleasantly surprised and the Rockbros Two Bicycle Indoor Vertical Bike Rack really and truly surpassed any expectations that I had. Once again RockBros pulled off a quality, well-designed, well-thought-out piece of biking equipment for a reasonable amount of money It looks great, is super-stable and heavy-duty, and does its job.
As I have reviewed and mentioned above – this is a very good vertical bike rack that I am very happy with.
But, in saying that – there are also some mods to make it better.
Sure, perhaps the company could have added a few things that I mention here, but these things are also totally my own opinion and preferences so you might find the rack just fine as-is, or you may like my mods and have some mods of my mods, or have other mods you want to do. Make sure you leave a comment in the comments below if you do.
The most important addition I made was adding foam pipe insulation to the central shaft where it is parallel to where the bike’s down tube hangs.
The bikes hang onto the hooks pretty securely and don’t tend to want to swing inward but a simple hit or bump against the bike might cause this to happen, and the foam padding eliminates any possibility of damage from that. I originally was going to hot-glue the foam padding on the shaft but ended up using zip-ties instead. Perhaps they don’t look as nice but they are secure and if I want to adjust the bike positions they can be moved up and down as needed, but they are tight enough to stay in place.
However, I suggest a long length of foam padding up and down the shaft even if it is above and below the level of the down tube, as this could also protect it while you are putting on the bike or taking it off and positioning it. It also protects your cranks and pedal if you forget to rotate them out of the way and are putting it on or sliding it off. There are a number of other padding things you could use here, and there are also variations in the foam pipe insulation types.
I also mounted some padding on the upper part of the legs of the bike rack. If your lower bike is not mounted real low this might be unnecessary but for me I wanted a little extra protection for when I was taking the bike off and such, this can protect the front chainring and things like that if it is in close proximity and something bumped the bike, or when you are taking the bike off and/or tilting it, etc.
The hooks have a nice vinyl padding on them but I wanted a bit more so I bought some Scotch Anti-Slip pads and cut them into strips and wrapped the hooks, giving them even more padding. This extra grippiness also decreased the ability of the bike from tending to swing, not that they wanted to swing much in the first place. You could also wrap them in anything else with extra padding or even spare bar wrap or something.
Another little mod I did, out of extreme paranoia – is to use a compression tape wrapped around just under the bottom edge of each of the mount arm clamps. I trust the clamps pretty well, they seem very well-made and hefty, but until I have had the rack for a while I am not going to 100% trust that these might not slip a bit over time and the compression tape can brake that clamp from sliding down. This stuff doesn’t have an adhesive but bonds to itself when wrapped tightly. It’s great stuff to have around and has a multitude of uses, this is just one.
Another idea I have that I have not implemented yet, and probably isn’t necessary anyway – is to put a rubber foot on the top of the extendable shaft and snug it against the ceiling. My thought was that this would further stabilize the rack but when I ordered this bike rack I had no idea how stable the legs were going to be. And now I kind of think that this is unnecessary.
But perhaps some people with very little space around the bottom of the bike rack and thus very little space to extend the legs might consider this option. Or take it further and create a foot and screw into the ceiling studs to extend the upper shaft into, or create a circular mount bolted into he ceiling that you could slide the top of the extendable shaft into. This would make it very strong and stable with the legs not needing to be extended very far. You can also buy floor-to-ceiling bike racks specifically made to do this.
The last thing is kind of important too, and consisted of just using some velcro ties or straps around the front wheel and over the down tube, to keep the front wheel and handlebar from swinging to one side.
